At The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance explores the timing of the contemporary news cycle, asking, “Why Do the Big Stories Keep Breaking at Night?”
A book based on the diaries Tina Brown kept during her eight years as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair will be published in November. Brown, who was head of the magazine from 1984 to 1992, says that when she revisited the journals, she “rediscovered how madcap those days were—how chancy, how new, how supercharged.” Henry Holt publisher Stephen Rubin assures readers that the book will have plenty of juicy gossip, promising that Brown will “spill some dirt on some of the flamboyant explosions around her, many of which she ignited herself. This will be a tell-all for the centuries.”
A lawsuit stemming from BuzzFeed’s publication of the Steele dossier, the unverified document alleging ties between Donald Trump and the Russian government, has been moved to federal court. The suit claims that BuzzFeed libeled Aleksej Gubarev, a tech executive whose name appeared in the document (and which BuzzFeed redacted and later apologized for including).
At Page-Turner, George Saunders considers the work of Grace Paley, the late author and activist, whose collected writings will be published next month. When you are reading Paley, Saunders writes, “A world is appearing before you that is richer and stranger than you could possibly have imagined, and that world gains rooms and vistas and complications with every phrase. What you are experiencing is intimate contact with an extraordinary intelligence, which causes the pleasant sensation of one’s personality receding and being replaced by the writer’s consciousness.”
At the New York Times, Ta Nehisi-Coates talks about his Marvel Comics series, “Black Panther,” and the way that politics has always shaped comics: “When you take a book like Spider-Man or Daredevil and the big thing is crime fighting, I don’t think that’s distant from the time when those characters were created. During that period, we had this rising crime, and the city was seen a certain way in a way that Manhattan is not seen today. Even the decision to create Black Panther: It was not an apolitical decision to have this black character in Africa, in this advanced nation, and have him be highly intelligent. All of these were political decisions.”
